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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28607550">When One Tooka's Away</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506'>Project0506</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Soft Wars [136]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blackmail, Bribery, Brothers being assholes, Gen, Humor, M/M, Star Wars AU - Soft Wars, brothers being brothers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:34:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,569</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28607550</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Just one perfectly average morning in Neyo and Vaughn's family.  With only minor blackmail, and a bit more bribery than Vaughn was expecting before lunch.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>CC-8826 | Neyo/CT-0292 | Vaughn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Soft Wars [136]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>336</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>When One Tooka's Away</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24049948">Tales of Derring-Do</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506">Project0506</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For you know who you are.  Because you know why.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Vaughn,” Neyo says but he’s not <em>really</em> talking to Vaughn at all. “Let’s go on a picnic.”</p><p> </p><p>He bounds through the kitchen on the very tips of his toes, glee spread manic on his face. Cupboards get rifled through randomly, edible things of even more random selection are thrown haphazard into their neat little portachiller.</p><p> </p><p>Is the word still ‘suspicious’, Vaughn wonders, when you have no doubt at all he’s up to something.</p><p> </p><p>“What,” he asks and his voice echoes his bemusement. “Now?” Neyo bounces around him in giddy gaiety, and his glee is contagious.</p><p> </p><p>“Seize the moment!” Neyo cheers. It prods a chuckle from Vaughn in response.</p><p> </p><p>“We <em>just</em> had firstmeal!” The sanitizer hasn’t even finished its cycle. The cutlery that gets dumped into the chiller are all their mismatched, bottom of the drawer ones.</p><p> </p><p>“We’re freemen Vaughn, we can eat whenever we want.”</p><p> </p><p>Well, Vaughn can’t really argue with that.</p><p> </p><p>“The last bit of cake is on the top shelf of the conservator,” he says.</p><p> </p><p>“I love you,” Neyo says and flyby kisses his cheek. Vaughn’s going to marry him some day, when he doesn’t think saying so will send him off to hide for a week while he debates just how much good he’s allowed in his life. Vaughn already has the forms. They’ll be legal on Concord Dawn and Naboo both, as soon as they’re signed. Vaughn’s already signed his spot. He has a shortlist of three spa planets they can pick between for their honeymoon.</p><p> </p><p>The cake goes in, as does the Vandor red they’d uncorked for dinner last night. So too do three flimsiplast cups of chocolate pudding, because at this point Vaughn has a Bly-worthy folder of supporting material why they should just buy a stake in the manufacturer.</p><p> </p><p>In minutes, nearly as fast as either or both of them could bug out, they are armed and ready for an impromptu mid-morning picnic.</p><p> </p><p>It takes almost as long for Neyo to convince Enentee to stay behind.</p><p> </p><p>He’s not even<em> trying</em> to hide his up-to-somethingness, is he? It’s comforting. Vaughn knows whatever Neyo’s plotting, he’s not the target.</p><p> </p><p>“No, no, you stay here,” Neyo murmurs, voice as warm and gentle as is impossible to convince him it ever is. Soft hands pick her pleading claws out of the knee of his pants. She chirrups, confused and betrayed, and tries to slip around him to the speeder anyway. He catches her around the tum as she tries, snugs her up against his shoulder and pets her apologetically. “No, not this time.”</p><p> </p><p>Enentee glares accusation over his shoulder at Vaughn, as though he’s the reason they’ve suddenly decided to start picnicking without her. He sighs, sinks in the passenger seat and tries not to sulk. Looks like he’ll be denied cuddles for <em>at least</em> a day after this latest transgression.</p><p> </p><p>Neyo chivvies her back into the house, and he marches back to their speeder like a man going to war. He doesn’t look back to see the mournful perch she takes in the front window, paw pressed pleadingly up against the transpariplast.</p><p> </p><p>A sad viola melody, Vaughn decides, with gathering clouds overhead churning into thunder and a sudden downpour. Commander Comely striding dramatically towards the viewer, jaw set in vicious self-restraint. Sidearm falling into step with him, silently commiserating.</p><p> </p><p>And then Enceetee will slip out through a previously-concealed hatch down the toilet to her secret animal spy base to receive her mission briefing. Shenanigans, close calls, her mission occurring alongside Comely’s while repeatedly narrowly escaping him noticing her, the race to get back to Comely Central before the Comely Commandos return.</p><p> </p><p>These episodes, Vaughn decides and very deliberately does not smile at Neyo’s stern face, write themselves. He’ll mock something up and send it to the next pitch meeting. He’s got a good feeling about this one. Interplanetary super spy-Enceetee merchandise is guaranteed to be a hit.</p><p> </p><p>Sidearm’s hotpants will also need to go scandalously translucent in the rain, that first scene. Vaughn’s show has a very specific viewership.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s just for the morning,” Neyo grumbles over the steering as he prompts the speeder to life. He pretends as though he’s talking to Vaughn and not trying to console himself. “She has to stay here. Or the plan won’t work.”</p><p> </p><p>“What is this plan exactly?” It’s a nice day: they leave the speeder canopy retracted and the wind promptly makes a total mess of Vaughn’s curls and whips the ends of Neyo’s ponytail like a banner. Whenever they get where they’re going, Neyo will look dashingly windswept and Vaughn will look like a Mykapo Poodle someone tased.</p><p> </p><p>Neyo it seems reads Vaughn’s mind sometimes. Rarely can Vaughn ever forget that he’s very, very good at discovering secrets. Neyo slips an arm along Vaughn’s shoulders, catches the ends of dark brown curls around long fingers and tugs gently. He likes Vaughn’s hair, no matter if it’s perfectly gelled, or viciously brushed out, or flat on one side right after waking, or frizzing in tufts along the top in the humidity. Vaughn keeps it longer than he would, for Neyo, even if half the time Vaughn knows he looks squadless. Neyo thinks he’s beautiful.</p><p> </p><p>Kark, Vaughn’s going to have to marry this man.</p><p> </p><p>“We’re going to have a nice picnic,” Neyo says, and his thrill at being obnoxiously circumspect crowds out his self-recrimination for abandoning his tooka alone in their warm, comfortable, sprawling homestead with nothing to comfort her except a tenday of kibble and more toys than Lightning Little dorms.</p><p> </p><p>Oh and she can always torment WAC, he -</p><p> </p><p>“What are we doing <em>after</em> the picnic?”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Kriff</em>!” Vaughn nearly leaps right out of the speeder. WAC pops his head up from the back seat, his eye projector slowly blinking its display in a facsimile of confusion.</p><p> </p><p>Neyo is very distinctly not-laughing. “Language,” he smarms. “There are little audio receptors.”</p><p> </p><p>“I am older than you,” WAC buzzes waspishly.</p><p> </p><p>“And your audio receptors are microscale.”</p><p> </p><p>WAC doesn’t concede the point, but he does retreat with a synthesized huff back to a huddle of machinery on the back floor Vaughn hadn’t even noticed. He roots through the portachiller grumpily. “Where’s the oil?”</p><p> </p><p>Neyo rolls his eyes as though he’s in any way annoyed. “In the toolbox under the seat. <em>Not</em> the chiller.”</p><p> </p><p>“But I like it cold!”</p><p> </p><p>“Your oil compartment doesn’t have temperature sensors.”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t know that.”</p><p> </p><p>“I built your torso myself WAC.”</p><p> </p><p>“What’s your point?”</p><p> </p><p>WAC digs an oil canister out from under the seat. Neyo notably doesn’t actually protest when he wriggles it into the scant space of the chiller. “If my wine tastes metallic I’m painting you vom-green.”</p><p> </p><p>“I have a big enough personality to pull off any color schema,” WAC retorts.</p><p> </p><p>Vaughn giggles, and again at the playful glare Neyo shoots him. “He does have that special something,” Vaughn defends faithfully.</p><p> </p><p>“Then I’ll wrap your right leg in sisal and dust it with lothnip.”</p><p> </p><p>“You’re still a real bastard,” WAC assures Neyo warmly. Neyo preens, and Vaughn giggles again.</p><p> </p><p>They aren’t going far, it turns out. Just to the edges of the lake that snugs up against the edges of their property, where they’ve built benches for loitering away long evenings under the sunset.</p><p> </p><p>They could have walked. It would have been shorter, even: the path speeder-wide winds far out of the way through the sparsest part of the forest so they wouldn’t need to cut down any more trees than they had to, while the footpath is almost a direct shot there. Enentee has scratched her clawly marks all down most of the bench legs. She’s spent many a day here terrorizing any local beastie knee high or lower.  There's no reason at all she should have to stay behind.</p><p> </p><p>It's extremely suspicious.</p><p> </p><p>Neyo spreads their eclectic mix of leftovers, dried snacks, cereals, and desserts across a rough-hewn picnic table with far too much glee. “Picnic,” he insists. “A nice leisurely meal out in the sunshine.”</p><p> </p><p>Vaughn and WAC exchange startlingly similar looks.</p><p> </p><p>“Why,” WAC sighs like he doesn’t really want to know, “did we need to be out of the house?”</p><p> </p><p>“Visibly,” Vaughn adds because they’d also taken the speeder from out front in a clear indication of not-home.</p><p> </p><p>Neyo grins. “<em>Blackmail</em>!”</p><p> </p><p>Well at least he’s happy. The droidoil is supposedly nicely chilled and the cake and wine are nicely decadent. Neyo dumps sugared-puffs into a pudding cup and wields the tiny presswood spoon-stick peeled off the lid like a maestro. The nuna roast and greens from dinner go right back into the chiller: none of them have any appetite for that cold.</p><p> </p><p>It really is a nice day. The sun burns off the last thin wisps of fog from the top of the lake and slowly bakes the rocks on shore. Between one moment and the next Vaughn finds himself stretched out along a bench, head in Neyo’s lap, Neyo’s nails scratching tiny circles into his scalp.</p><p> </p><p>WAC scuttles along the shore clicking chastisingly at birds that dare to perch too low, on Enentee’s behalf, he insists. One suspects he’s having quite a bit of fun with it.</p><p> </p><p>Under Vaughn’s neck, Neyo’s thigh shudders with repressed cackles. That’d be his blackmail then.</p><p> </p><p>“Let me see?” Neyo obediently tips his holopad so they can both watch the display.</p><p> </p><p>It’s the catcam at the front of the house.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Security</em> cam.”</p><p> </p><p>Security cam in full color that is deliberately not calibrated to ignore small, non-threat critters flitting about their front yard. Of course, Vaughn’s mistake.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you want to watch or not?” Neyo grouses.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll be good,” Vaughn promises cheerily. “Seems like something interesting is happening on the security cat cam.”</p><p> </p><p>“You're not as cute as you think you are.”</p><p> </p><p>“He’s adorable,” WAC yells supportively from down the shore. Vaughn points at him, acknowledging. Neyo rolls his eyes, as though annoyed with them both.</p><p> </p><p>Bacara’s speeder slides neatly to a stop in front of their door.</p><p> </p><p>The holocam really is very good, the colors are incredibly crisp. Vaughn can see the freckles dotting the man’s nose, the lightness in his eyes and step. He’s been up for a while, it’s clear, and it’s obvious he’s had a very productive morning. He hauls a pail out of the front floorboards and if he were at all a man given to whistling, Vaughn would believe he would be then. Neyo snickers.</p><p> </p><p>“What did you do?”</p><p> </p><p>“Nothing,” he insists and Vaughn only mostly believes him.</p><p> </p><p>“He’s nice enough to bring us part of his catch-”</p><p> </p><p>“He’s offloading his excess because he likes fishing more than he actually likes having fish for every single meal,” Neyo lies because they both know Bacara sells most of what he catches, after he picks the nicest ones for his house and a few others.</p><p> </p><p>“Neyo.”</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t do anything! I just have a suspicion that I want to get holographic evidence of.”</p><p> </p><p>Vode will vode, Vaughn supposes. And khi’vode will khi’vode.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m older.” Vaughn pats Neyo’s knee and doesn’t bother to respond.</p><p> </p><p>The security cams <em>inside</em> the house are much less precise as the ones outside, <em>so</em> strangely. Bacara is all holographic blues when he lets himself into their house and contently wanders his way to their kitchen.</p><p> </p><p>“He caught tautogs today,” Neyo notices as Bacara crossloads the fish to their conservator. “Ocean must still be cold.” He makes a face as though he’s embarrassed he’s listened closely enough to his brother to remember that. He’s a lot sweeter than he’s willing to admit.</p><p> </p><p>His job complete, Bacara … well.</p><p> </p><p>The image on their inside security holocams isn’t <em>great</em>, but Bacara looks distinctively shifty. He wanders through the house very, deliberately, idle. Checking for them, Vaughn realizes. Wanting to see if any of them are home.</p><p> </p><p>Neyo makes a sound of throaty glee.</p><p> </p><p>Bacara clears the house with all the speed of his Marine training. He makes a beeline for the living room.</p><p> </p><p>“Start record,” Neyo orders. If he wasn’t holding the holopad, Vaughn suspects he’d be rubbing his hands in fiendish delight. Vaughn himself is desperately curious, and he shoves himself upright and wedges himself in between Neyo’s arms for a better look.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Hey there,”</em> on-screen Bacara coaxes. Enentee perches on the back of the couch and drips him a look of tooka disdain. <em>“Hello girl, will you let me pet you?”</em> No, as it turns out. No she will not. Enentee twitches her ears in warning and lowers her head. <em>“Okay. Okay we’re not friends yet. Are you hungry?”</em></p><p> </p><p>The former Marshall Commander of the Marines hunkers down on Vaughn’s living room floor. He pulls out a wrapped package from his pouch. There is an <em>entire fresh fish</em> more than the length of a palm, that was neatly filleted and cleaned and wrapped and stored in his pocket. <em>“</em><em>Does this look good?”</em></p><p> </p><p>Yes, Enentee’s ears flip forward to say. Yes it does. She’s interested, though not convinced. Bacara slices off a sliver and places it on the floor just below her. She’s interested, but not yet convinced.</p><p> </p><p>He wiggles it. She’s convinced.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>See,”</em> Bacara can be heard commentating, <em>“there are definite, tangible benefits here. To being friends. Friends share fish, and let friends pet them.”</em></p><p> </p><p>Enentee is an expensive lady, she doesn’t sell pets for a <em>single</em> slice of fish. Bacara obediently produces another, and another.</p><p> </p><p>“He knows we feed her right?”</p><p> </p><p>“This isn’t feeding, it’s bribery.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Now? Okay no. More fish then.”</em> The fourth slice gets him one and about a half skritches at precisely one ear. <em>“Good, that’s progress.”</em></p><p> </p><p>It is the sweetest karking thing, and Vaughn already thought that Rex’s husband was the sweetest thing. “You’re not going to tease him about this are you?”</p><p> </p><p>“Mercilessly.”</p><p> </p><p>Khi’vod, Vaughn sighs, will khi’vod. Bacara rations slice after slice of fish for the occasional head scratch, one head-to-rump pet and some truly token, condescending purrs.</p><p> </p><p>“We should get him a tooka.”</p><p> </p><p>“He doesn’t want a tooka,” Neyo drawls in clear mocking imitation. “He’s not a tooka person.”</p><p> </p><p>Vaughn wonders if Neyo actually misses the irony there or if he just ignores it.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Okay, we’re not at a paw-touching level yet. I can respect that. Next time. Maybe you’d like a mackerel better.”</em></p><p> </p><p>“Right,” Vaughn says with full skepticism.</p><p> </p><p>“Right?” Neyo chortles. He saves the recording as Enentee decides that the end of Bacara’s fish signals time to wrap up the little attention she bothered to grant him. Bacara seems perfectly content with just that, as he packs up and leaves.</p><p> </p><p>He wipes up the little fishy spots on Vaughn’s hardwood floors with soap before he goes. Vaughn cannot let Neyo torment him with this.</p><p> </p><p>“How about bribery,” Vaughn offers, thinking fast. Neyo makes a sound that says he’s vaguely listening but not overly interested. Vaughn doesn’t know whether he learned it from Enentee or the other way around. “I’d be willing to bet that Rex would sign up for some pretty hefty favors for a copy of that. Torrent has troopers spread across the Core, and Anakin and his group are off harrying Hutts all over the Rim. Bet they come across all sorts of obnoxious gift ideas he could have them get for you.”</p><p> </p><p>Neyo is tempted, but not convinced.</p><p> </p><p>“Remember if you tease Bacara, he’ll <em>stop</em> bringing her fresh fish and hand-feeding her.”</p><p> </p><p>Neyo is tempted, but not convinced. Vaughn wiggles his bait. “She’ll be so <em>sad</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>Neyo’s convinced.</p>
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